Cassini/Huygens: The Italian contribution to a successful mission

The Cassini/Huygens mission, to explore Saturn and its moons, was the result of a successful cooperation among the space agencies of United States (NASA), Europe (ESA) and Italy (ASI). Launched on October 1997, the mission has reached one of its main objectives on January 2005, with the successful descent of the ESA Huygens probe on Titan moon. The development of this challenging mission has requested the involvement of a large number of industries and research centres worldwide. Italian space community has been deeply involved on both the Cassini spacecraft, on the basis of the NASA-ASI agreement, and the Huygens probe, as a member state of ESA. On both those major elements of the mission, the developments refer to some scientific instruments and to major subsystems, critical for the success of the overall mission. It is the purpose of this paper to overview the elements contributed by Italy as well as their roles to the mission and their achieved results.